Train Your Brain To Eat Healthier

Are you struggling to stick to a nutritious diet? We’ve discovered some tricks that will help.

Changing your eating habits isn’t just a matter of buying better foods. To make the change stick, you also need to adopt a healthy eating mindset – here are 12 tips that will help.

1. Call yourself a fruit lover

As soon as you start calling yourself something you’re more likely to embrace it as your brain starts to see the name as part of your identity. “This provides a sense of motivation and you then seek out behaviour that affirms that identity – like buying and eating more fruit,” says psychologist Amanda Brouwer from Winona State University in the US.

2. Ask yourself, ‘Will I eat vegetables today?’

When we question whether we’re going to carry out a behaviour, we’re actually more likely to make the healthier choice. For best results, Dr Natalie Taylor from Macquarie University says your question needs to include four things: An action, a target, a time and a context. So, say you’ll eat an extra serving of vegetables (action), at dinner (target), four nights this week (time), when I cook my dinner myself (context).

3. Step off the scales

If you think you’re overweight, you’re actually more likely to make unhealthy choices when you eat.” Focusing on weight creates stress and emotions like guilt or shame that can make some of us more likely to seek out high-calorie foods,” says psychologist Vicki Williams from Sydney Behavioural Health. The good news is: If you’ve been eating healthily and avoiding the scales, when you do weigh yourself you’ll probably find you’ve lost weight.

4. Seek out healthy food pics online